


Don't Fear the Reaper

by Eponin



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode Related, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-04
Updated: 2011-04-04
Packaged: 2017-10-17 14:25:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/177795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eponin/pseuds/Eponin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At St. Mary’s hospital in Jefferson City, people have stopped dying.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Don't Fear the Reaper

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place immediately following the last scene in Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things. Spoilers up through 2x04, especially for In My Time of Dying.
> 
> Thanks to Scarlett_o and after_the_light for the beta!

Something was missing, some vital piece that would let her wake up, go back to a normal life, but she had no idea what it was or where to find it.

So every night at midnight, during the shift change on the ward, she would slip out. It had gotten to be a game, seeing if she could get out unnoticed and how long it would take the nurses to come and find her. It was harmless, and most of the night nurses catered to her need to escape. They’d come and find her when the ward had settled down again.

A huffed sigh drew her attention from the bay in the emergency room where frantic doctors worked on a dying accident victim. Blood and antiseptic scented the air. “You know you’re not supposed to be down here, Jane.”

She shrugged. She remembered, but only when they reminded her. As soon as they took her back to her room, she’d forget again. It always happened that way. This inability to remember _anything_ , even her own name, frustrated her.

She hadn’t always been this way; she knew that even if she couldn’t remember anything else.

As the nurse led her away, she threw one glance back over her shoulder at the man on the table and wondered how she knew he was dying, without hearing anything they said inside the room.

++++++++++

Dean held his cell phone up so he could see the road and peer at the lit number on the display at the same time. “Yeah.”

Rustling and thumping echoed over the phone and he imagined Bobby digging through his cluttered mess of a house for _something_.

“Bobby?”

“I’m here, I’m here.”

Bobby’s low voice sounded muffled, like maybe he’d buried himself beneath one of the leaning towers of books or newspapers scattered throughout the rooms.

“What the hell are you doing?”

He heard a grunt, followed by a thumping noise, and then Bobby’s voice came through loud and clear. “Fixin’ an engine.”

“Inside the house?”

“Supposed to rain.”

Dean nodded to himself. “Fair enough. What’s up?”

“Weird shit in the paper, the last week or so. From Jefferson City.”

Dean forced his face to stillness, the name rubbing salt into wounds still raw and bleeding. “What kind of weird?”

“Our kind. I’m sorry to send you, kid, but there’s no one else. The hospital your Daddy died in – St. Mary’s? No one’s died there in over a month. Not since you boys left.”

“St. Mary’s. You’re sure.” Dean heard his voice go flat.

“What’s going on?” Sam had been quiet, withdrawn, since they’d pulled back onto the road outside of Lawrence, and now his voice in the silence of the car made Dean jump. He waved at Sam to be silent, curling his hand around the phone to listen. Beside him, Sam sat up straight, turned to look directly at Dean for the first time in hours, left hand still curved protectively around his injured right wrist.

“I’m sure.”

Dean clicked the phone shut and slid it back into his jacket pocket. He stayed silent while Sam shifted on the seat next to him before finally speaking.

“This isn’t a good idea, Dean.”

“It’s a job, Sammy.”

“But now? And back in Jefferson City? Come on, Dean.”

Dean knew exactly what Sam meant, knew he was referring to Dean’s outburst on the side of the road a few hours earlier. He forced down the real reason he wanted to go; that whatever had gone wrong at St. Mary’s was his fault, because he still lived.

“It’s a job, Sam.” And that was the end of it, as far as Dean was concerned. Sammy never knew when to let things lie, though.

“Do you think…?”

“No.” Dean shot a glance at Sam.

“Dean, if it’s St. Mary’s. It could be.”

Fingers tightening on the steering wheel, Dean turned resolutely back to studying the road. “It’s not him, Sammy. We made sure of it. Remember?” Flashes of salt and fire and that tightening feeling in his chest passed behind his eyes. “It’s not Dad.”

++++++++++

They changed clothes in a rest stop bathroom just outside the city limits – nicer shirts, jeans with no holes or stains. Dean fished through the IDs he kept in the Impala’s glove box for press passes and watched Sam throw on a sports jacket and retrieve a battered notebook and pen from his bag.

“The _New York Times_?” Sam asked, eyes wide, when Dean handed him one of the passes.

“Why not? The story’s already been done locally.” He grinned. “It makes us _important_ ,” he embellished, then shrugged. “Hopefully it’ll make people want to talk to us.”

Sam shook his head. “You’re nuts, you know that, right?”

“You need to relax, Sammy, its more fun on my side of the fence.”

Sam just rolled his eyes and slid back into the front seat of the Impala.

++++++++++

Sam talked their way up from the hospital information desk to a meeting with St. Mary’s administrator, using just their fake press passes and his smile. Dean distracted himself while they waited by flirting with Nadine Fulton’s secretary, one hip perched on the edge of her mahogany desk.

He looked up when the door to the inner office opened and Nadine waved them back. “C’mon in, gentlemen.” She had a low, almost raspy voice that would have fit right in at a jazz bar in New Orleans.

“Look,” she said, jumping right in as soon as they were all seated. “Get one thing straight if you want an interview with anyone in this hospital. There are no miracles here. I see headlines to that effect and we’ll sue.”

Sam sat forward, hands clasped earnestly in front of him. “What do you mean, no miracles? No one’s died here in a month, right? Isn’t that a good thing?”

Nadine sighed and shook her head. “There’s a man in the ICU who’s had four heart attacks in the last two days. The first attack destroyed his heart; he should have died then, but every time he dies, he wakes up again. Hell, the amount of morphine we have to give him for the pain should have killed him.”

Dean shoved a cold chill away, exchanging glances with Sam. Was the room colder or was it just him? Fuck he hated hospitals.

“Patients here… they’re not getting better, they’re just not dying.”

++++++++++

They split up once they’d left the administration offices.

“The worst cases are likely to be in the ER and in ICU,” Sam said.

“I’ll go down to the ER.” Dean jumped at the chance, wanting to stay away from the ICU as long as possible. He’d spent enough time there in July.

Sam watched him as he walked away and Dean figured his brother knew exactly why he’d chosen what he had. He was grateful Sam didn’t call him on it. They’d had enough emotional moments on the road yesterday. He just wanted to get back to what passed for normal.

++++++++++

A heavy silence lay over the ER, smacking him in the face when he stepped off the elevator; a weighty thing that should have been visible to the naked eye.

Dean drew his coat tighter around his body, shoving his hands in his pockets, chilled. “No way this is natural,” he muttered to himself.

He found himself wondering if the choice to go with plastic, mustard colored chairs in the waiting area was meant as an attempt to keep cleanup quick and easy. There was bulletproof glass in the barrier between the ER and the waiting room, and the door was most likely triggered by a button at the nurses’ station, closing off the main room in case of an emergency.

He skirted the edge of the waiting room, careful not to draw the attention of anyone important, then stepped through the sliding door and into the main room. Doctors and interns moved between the curtained areas on either side of the floor and clinic rooms at the back. Nurses double and triple checked supplies and their low conversations held an undercurrent of despair.

Off to the side a couple sat near one of the curtained areas, occasionally peering inside. They didn’t look too worried, so Dean figured their situation wasn’t anything serious. The gray haired woman waiting by herself outside one of the private clinic rooms was another story. She paced the floor in front of the room with red eyes and sunken cheeks. From the way she wrung her hands, whomever she waited on wasn’t in good shape.

Movement at the door between the ER and the waiting area drew his eye and he turned to study the girl who stood there. She hovered, eyes planted on the weeping woman and the room she stood guard over. Curious, he drifted in her direction, coming at the door from an angle so he could keep out of her line of sight. Something about the way she stood there, peering in from outside, made him think she’d vanish if he gave her any warning.

He sidled up next to her. She peered at him from underneath long bangs.

“That man should have died days ago,” she said.

“What?”

“The man in that room.” She gestured to the other woman. “He’s arrested four times in the last two days, he’s not getting better. They keep him drugged, otherwise he screams and screams from the pain.”

“Why haven’t they moved him to the ICU yet?”

She shrugged. “Not stable enough. They decided just to keep him here.” She looked over at him, dark eyes serious. “I think they want to transfer him out, hope he’ll pass on if he’s not here, but his wife keeps hoping he’ll get better.”

They watched the woman and Dean was struck again by the thought that she was standing guard, a sentinel against death. He shivered again in the cold and turned to go find Sam.

++++++++++

She watched him leave, wondered where his brother was.

She moved inside the room, over to the window of the private room where the man’s wife had left her station, taken up a post inside, while he coded again, died again. Woke again.

She wondered how she knew Dean had a brother.

The name registered, filtered from her subconscious to her awake mind.

 _Dean_.

It clicked.

The name brought everything back, flung the door to her memory open in one quick rush. She wondered if this was what it felt like to be human, to be frail and mortal and breakable.

What she did, what all shepherds of souls did, was supposed to be inviolate.

She snarled, slapping one hand against the window glass in a sudden surge of temper. The glass cracked, a web spiraled out from the center of her palm to her fingertips.

++++++++++

“What’s here, Dean?”

Dean stepped back into the ER, Sam trailing along. He searched the room; everything looked the same except the girl he’d talked to was gone. Damn.

“There was a girl,” he started.

Sam laughed. “Isn’t there always?”

“Shut up,” he growled, but there was no heat to it. “She looked familiar, but I didn’t realize it until I was back upstairs.”

Sam frowned. “Someone you saw while we were here before?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

A younger man, plain and brown haired, pushed through the door behind them. He arrowed straight for the older woman, urged her away from the little room and the man inside.

Dean heard him say, “Lets go get a cup of coffee, Mom,” when they passed by.

He watched and waited for them to leave the room, made sure they were gone, then headed over to the old man’s room, pulling out his EMF meter.

“Dean!” Sam hurried to follow him. “What are you doing?”

“What does it look like?” He waved the EMF meter around for emphasis. “I’m taking readings.”

“Here? Come on, Dean, the guy’s dying.”

“Yeah, and that’s why I’m taking the readings. That girl? She said this guy has died four times in the last two days.”

Sam sighed. “Yeah, alright. Just,” he glanced over at the ER door. “hurry up.”

Dean rolled his eyes and tossed him a look that said, _well duh_ , before moving up to the room. The meter squealed as he got close and he hurriedly shut it off. He followed Sam’s gaze, watching as he peered around the door to see if they’d drawn any attention, but no one was looking their way.

Dean turned the volume down all the way, then flipped the power on the meter again. He held it up to the door, slipping inside to scan the dying man.

Nothing. The meter didn’t light up even a little. He frowned and glanced back at Sam, who shrugged, just as puzzled. He scanned around the room, the machines, just in case, but still nothing registered. It wasn’t until he again passed in front of the window near the door that the meter pinged.

That was when he noticed the crack in the glass. Sam swung around and peered at it from the other side. “Was it like this earlier?”

“I don’t know.” Dean gave him a wry grin. “I wasn’t paying attention to the window.”

++++++++++

In the end they headed upstairs to the fourth floor and the ICU in the hopes of finding something more than a cracked window; something to give them a little more direction. There was a faint hint of _something_ that the meter picked up near two of the rooms and Dean shied away from it almost habitually when he realized one was _his_ old room and the other was where his father had been found dead.

“Well, that can’t be a coincidence,” Sam murmured when he saw the rooms.

Dean snorted. “And you went to college to learn to speak the obvious?”

A sharp beeping echoed out into the hall from Dean’s old room, loud where everything else had been muffled, and they both jumped. Medical personnel converged on the room from all directions, pushing Sam and Dean out of the way.

“He’s arresting again, get the paddles!” someone shouted.

Dean watched as they pulled in the crash cart and attempted to resuscitate the tubed man inside. He staggered back slightly when the image of himself laying on that same bed, in that same position, flashed through his mind.

He wondered if he’d ever truly healed from the crash, if he ever would. The scars that traced lines over his body had healed, true, but he doubted what lay beneath them, unseen, ever would. Ever could. He watched, silent, as yet again someone else died again, and wondered if this, too, was his fault.

He should never have come back.

The hand that jerked him by the collar into the room behind him caught Dean completely off guard. He stumbled backwards and found himself inside, the door shut behind him, before he could regain his balance.

He bounced off the bed and spun around, right hand reaching for the gun shoved in the waistband of his jeans. “What the hell?”

“Hello, Dean.”

Dean frowned at the woman from the ER. “You again.” The last thing he needed was to be tossed out for carrying concealed weapons inside the hospital, but he loosened his shirt before sliding his hand away from his gun. He clenched and relaxed his fingers by his side, hoarding the adrenaline rush. “How do you know who I am?”

He looked her over, not bothering to hide his appraisal. She wore the green scrubs all the ICU nurses wore.

“I remember you. You lost your father.” She moved to stand in front of him. “I’m very sorry.”

Dean tensed. Damn hospitals. Damn nurses who thought they needed to bring up everything unpleasant, who thought all issues had to be confronted. God he hated this place. Really, he hated hospitals in general, but this one… this one made him want to hightail it out of here and never look back.

He shoved down the memories of Dad that threatened to surface and moved to step around the nurse.

“Wait,” she said, blocking the way out of the room. “I didn’t mean to bring up bad memories, but I saw you in the hall and wanted to see how you were doing.”

“Fine,” Dean growled, and moved around her toward the door. “I’m doing fine. I need to go find my brother.”

“Dean.”

The door slammed open behind him and Sam blew into the room, all wide eyes and frantic motion.

Dean jumped. Again. “Damn it,” he muttered. He was acting like a girl, startling at every sound.

Sam huffed a relieved laugh. “What the hell are you doing in here? You just disappeared; you scared the crap out of me, Dean!”

“I was talking with, her.” Dean turned to point and froze. The nurse was gone. He’d been facing the door and she hadn’t moved past him. He turned back to face Sam, who stared at him with narrowed eyes and brows drawn low.

“Talking with _who_ , Dean?”

“Ahh, shit, Sammy. I think I’ve just been talking with whatever the hell is causing all this.”

“It was a girl?”

“A nurse; said she recognized me from last month.” He frowned. “She remembered Dad, wanted to give me condolences, or some such crap.”

He took out the EMF reader and waved it around the room, but it didn’t so much as peep. “She must not’ve been in here long enough.” He pushed past Sam, out into the hallway.

Nurses and technicians moved in and out of the room across the hall. Dean could see the form of the man on the bed, head covered with a sheet.

“He stayed dead?”

“Yeah. That’s what I was coming in to tell you,” said Sam.

“What changed?”

“And why did she want to talk to you?” Sam added.

“What?”

“Look, people weren’t dying, and now they are. If it has something to do with the woman you were talking to, then sometime today, something changed. If she wanted to talk to you, maybe there’s a connection.”

Right. Dean rubbed between his eyes, as if he could wipe away the memories this place had left behind. “Well, come on.”

“And you know where we’re going, how?”

Dean shrugged. “I don’t. But I’ve seen her here and in the ER. And she’s not here.”

They left the ICU and headed for the elevators at the end of the hall. The woman stood at the entrance to the stairs. She smiled at them and waved, then floated _through_ the door. Dean caught Sam’s eye and they both sprinted forward.

They slammed through the door, Dean pushing himself faster to get ahead of Sammy’s mutant giraffe legs. The woman wasn’t on the other side and the only way to go was down.

Sam leaned over the rail.

“See anything?”

“No,” he shrugged, “but she obviously wants us to follow her.”

Dean yanked out his Colt, the one Dad had given him when he turned ten. Sam pulled out his favorite curved blade, the one he’d had before he left for college, the one he’d hung onto all that time. Dean hoped Sam was still as good with the blade in his off hand as he’d been before he’d left for college.

“I still don’t know what you see in that blade, Sammy.”

“I like it. It’s different.”

And didn’t _that_ just sum up Sam.

The stairs stopped in the basement.

“What the hell’s down here?” Dean grumbled.

Sam shrugged. “Maybe she died down here?”

“You ever hear of a spirit who _stopped_ people from dying, Sammy?”

Sam shrugged. “Well, if she’s not a spirit, we’ve got nothing.”

Dean snorted, pushed open the door to the boiler room. “Who cares? Let’s salt and burn her ass and get the hell out of here.” They swung into the room, splitting up and moving to either side of the door.

She stood in the center of the room. Beneath her feet a design Dean didn’t recognize had been drawn in chalk. Candles glowed a sullen red, sputtering at the points of the design. Sam’s breath hissed between his teeth.

“You recognize it?” Dean whispered to Sam.

Sam shook his head no.

“Hello again, Dean,” she said.

Beside him Sam murmured, “It’s never good when they know you, Dean.”

She laughed and her form shimmered, seemed to vanish into a whirling kaleidoscope of vapor and ash. When she reformed her black hair had picked up blue highlights, shortening into a neat bob. She had dressed herself in black, a camisole and jeans. She looked like a prep school girl trying to go goth.

Somehow she’d succeeded.

“Do you remember me now?” she asked, taking a step closer to him.

Dean raised the gun as she moved, aiming at her chest, then staggered back when the memories rushed to the front of his mind. He cried out, the gun falling form nerveless fingers, hands reaching up to clutch at his temples. He heard Sam shout his name, but it sounded distant, hollow, and Dean ignored it in favor of the pain tearing his mind apart.

Images tore through him, movie stills of actions he hadn’t remembered taking, snippets of conversations he didn’t remember having.

 _Lunging at a VAGUE form hovering over a dying little girl._

 _“It’s your time to go, Dean.”_

 _The shattering of a glass spilling water across the floor._

“Dean!” Sam’s voice pulled him free from the torrent, right next to him.

He jerked away, clapping one hand over his ear. “Dude! Don’t shout.” He winced. A sledgehammer pounded away inside his skull. “Ow.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah.” He stood, careful not to upset his head. Sam’s hand around his elbow steadied him and Dead allowed the help. This time. It felt like his head might fall off. He looked over at the reaper. “Tessa.”

She smiled at him. “Dean.”

“Who is she, Dean?” Sam had scooped up his gun and now held it steady in his left hand, pointed at Tessa. They had both learned to shoot ambidextrously. He had tucked the handle of his blade into the front pocket of his jeans.

“Give me the gun, Sammy. You can’t hurt her with it.”

Sam frowned and passed it to him, but he retrieved his knife, too.

“She’s the reaper,” he said, then laughed. “Sammy, meet Tessa.”

Sam’s eyes widened and he stepped in front of Dean, shielding him.

Tessa laughed. “Relax. I’m not here for either of you.”

“C’mon, Sammy, move.”

The tension didn’t leave Sam’s frame, but he did step aside to stand shoulder to shoulder with Dean. “Why haven’t you been taking the souls of the dying?”

Dean looked at her, startled. Right. Not-dying people. The whole reason they were here. Sammy always did make connections at a blinding speed. Of course, Sammy didn’t have a pickaxe in his brain, either.

“I forgot.”

“You forgot to take the souls?” Sam asked.

“No,” said Tessa, “I forgot who I was. Seeing your brother woke me, made me remember.”

“How does a reaper forget who they are?” Dean asked.

She looked at him, looked down at her feet. “You know how.”

Sam stared at the floor, then moved forward in a rush. “Oh god.”

“What?” Dean looked wildly back and forth between his brother and the reaper. “What is it?”

Sam turned back to him, stricken. “This is the stuff Dad asked me to get for him. While you were still unconscious.” He gestured at the floor. “The bowl, the herbs, the candles. All of it.”

Dean moved to study the design on the floor. Yew, dittany, wormwood, Asafoetida. Myrrh. Sam had book smarts, but Dean had studied the supernatural, read Dad’s books, memorized the lesson’s he had taught. “This is to _summon_ a demon,” he whispered, and a last image flashed through his mind.

 _Yellow eyes. “Your lucky day, kid.”_

“Dad, what did you do?” Dean sank to the floor.

Tessa stepped up to Dean, grasped his jacket and pulled him to his feet. “Let it go,” she said. “It’s done, can’t be taken back. His sacrifice allows you to keep fighting. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“Not like this,” Dean whispered. He looked up at her. “Take me instead. Bring him back. I was supposed to be the one who died.”

“Dean!” Sam choked.

She shook her head. “I’m sorry, but I can’t take things back. No do-overs, no refunds.”

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” Dean said again.

“No, but that’s the way of things. Some must die so others will live. It might hurt now,” she said, “but it was his choice.”

“Not his. It should have been mine.” Dean stood, anger giving his strength back to him.

“Probably,” she nodded, “but he made the decision as a parent.”

“I’m an adult.” Dean glared at her.

“You’re still his child.” She smiled.

Dean forced down the tears that had been threatening since Gordon Walker, since that stupid clown, since he’d seen Dad, shirt stripped open, surrounded by doctors and machines and the sound that meant he was never coming back.

“Remember his sacrifice, Dean. Remember what he did and why he did it when the nightmares start up again. Remember that you were important to him, that you were worthy to him.”

More memories he could never forget. Yellow eyes; his father _praising_ him, tearing him up inside. “Damn it. Stay out of my head.” He shook his head, forced the memories back into the compartment he kept them in.

“Did you take him?” Sam asked her. “Did you take our father?”

“No. I haven’t taken anyone since _it_ gave your brother his life back.”

“Sammy, we need to go.” He pushed his brother towards the door.

“Dean, wait.”

He paused in the doorway and turned back to face her.

“Would you have left with me?”

 _Moment of truth. What’s it going to be?_

Dean held her gaze for a long, frozen moment, aware of Sammy standing next to him, tension stiffening his frame, glancing back and forth between the two of them. “Yeah. I would have.”

She nodded, smiled that girlish smile that had made him want to protect her in the first place. Damned if it didn’t still bring up those feelings.

She stepped forward, one hand held out. Sam tightened fingers in the back of his jacket.

“Here,” she said.

He took the slip of paper from her hand, careful not to let his fingers touch hers.

She grinned, knowing.

“What’s this?

“A name. What you’ve been looking for. The symbol is _his_. Be careful saying that name out loud. You don’t want to draw his attention any more than you already have.” She looked up at him through long, black lashes. “I can’t help you more than this, but I owe him – that demon. Consider this my payback. And a thank you for waking me up again.”

She drifted past them, and Dean noticed again that her feet never quite touched the floor. How had he missed that before? Apparently he needed to be more observant when he was dead.

She looked back over her shoulder. “I’ll see you again,” she said, and Dean knew it was a promise.

He grinned at her, and winked, because hell, she was pretty. There were worse ways to go.

“Dude,” Sam stared at him, incredulous, when Tessa had vanished around the corner. “Will you flirt with _everything_?”

Sam rolled his eyes and led the way to the stairs.

“Woah. Sammy?” Dean grabbed his jacket and pulled him around, another memory pushing itself to the front of his mind. “An ouija board? You used an _ouija board_?”

Sam laughed and pulled free. He headed up the stairs to the lobby.

“What are you, twelve?

“Yeah, well. It worked.”

Dean thought about that. “Point.” He clapped his hand on Sam’s shoulder. “Lets go get that hand checked out.”


End file.
